Art Magic Technology
Here is the first in a series of previews of the Electronomicon that I will be presenting at this year’s Esoteric Book Conference. Click the image to view it full-size in a light box.
Tickets to the conference are still available, and the art show and book fair are free to the public, so even if you are not ticketed, please feel free to come by and see me and the other artists there.
Related articles: 3D Sigil Maker | Beginning Interactive Multimedia Ritual Design
I am teaching another course at Arcanorium College, from June 6 to July 16, that will show you how to program a computer to draw a three-dimensional sigil of any word that you input into it — example below. You will learn how to change the sigil’s color, view it from any position, animate it, and save it as an image or video file that you can then use in ritual performance.
The course will introduce you to the Processing programming language developed for artists and designers. Processing may be used to generate an unlimited variety of visual or musical sigils or other magical devices (here is another example). Each week will expand on what was learned the week before, and the lessons will be presented so that anyone can come back to them and continue to learn from them. The skills you learn will be applicable to several contemporary projects in multimedia magic that we will explore in future courses at Arcanorium.
The six-week syllabus will include:
The course is available to all Arcanorium students. Registration fees for the College are UK£60 for 12 months or UK£20 for 3 months, which include all classes (~2 every 6 to 8 weeks).
Dakota Crane “designs psychic machinery for the Invisibles,” which apparently includes some amazing drawings of a technomagical nature. I recently won this Twitter contest for an original piece by Dakota, which arrived this week and is too cool. Move over, Symbolic Hieronymus Machine; make way for the Heterodyne Acustator / Perceptic Inevitabilitron! [1]
Here is a high-res scan of the drawing on Dakota’s site.
Related articles: Build Your Own 3D Sigil Generator
This Processing project draws three-dimensional sigils similar to those drawn with Kameas, but on a cube instead of a square. A word (in the following example, “HYPERITUAL” — the duplicate ‘R’ removed) is mapped onto a 9 × 9 cube representing the 26 letters of the English alphabet (the center cube is blank; see table, below). Here is a video showing the sigil rotating on three axes:
Click here to run the program in your browser (click here to view the source code) . This interactive version includes the following keyboard controls:
The below image shows the positions of the letters forming a sigil for AZATHOTH. Click the image to run the interactive program in your browser, which responds to your mouse position and buttons (click here for the source code)
Enhancement ideas include interactive input for the word to be sigilized; toggle to show/hide letters; stroke color selector; buttons to save sigil as image or animation; vector interactions with multiple words; various maps (magic cubes, other languages); OpenGL rendering with thicker lines.
| Character | Index | X | Y | Z |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 0 | -1 | -1 | -1 |
| B | 1 | 0 | -1 | -1 |
| C | 2 | 1 | -1 | -1 |
| D | 3 | -1 | 0 | -1 |
| E | 4 | 0 | 0 | -1 |
| F | 5 | 1 | 0 | -1 |
| G | 6 | -1 | 1 | -1 |
| H | 7 | 0 | 1 | -1 |
| I | 8 | 1 | 1 | -1 |
| J | 9 | -1 | -1 | 0 |
| K | 10 | 0 | -1 | 0 |
| L | 11 | 1 | -1 | 0 |
| M | 12 | -1 | 0 | 0 |
| space | 13 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| N | 14 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| O | 15 | -1 | 1 | 0 |
| P | 16 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Q | 17 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| R | 18 | -1 | -1 | 1 |
| S | 19 | 0 | -1 | 1 |
| T | 20 | 1 | -1 | 1 |
| U | 21 | -1 | 0 | 1 |
| V | 22 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| W | 23 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| X | 24 | -1 | 1 | 1 |
| Y | 25 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Z | 26 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Tenth TAD project. This is a variation of Tuesday’s project. I wrote it as a prelude to a test interface I am developing for a device to showcase later. To operate, press the ‘1’ key on your keyboard to rotate the ring to the left; press ‘2’ to rotate to the right; press ‘0’ to stop the rotation; press ‘4’ to show/hide the center sigil. (The rotation is jerky online. I need to sort out what that is about.)
Source code:
/** ResponsiveSigils * by Joshua Madara, hyperRitual.com * Press 1 to rotate ring to the left * Press 2 to rotate ring to the right * Press 0 to stop rotating ring * Press 4 to toggle the sigil in/visisble * Sigils drawn in GIMP with brushes by * http://redheadstock.deviantart.com/ */ PImage ring; PImage sigil; float counter = 0; // count rotation int sw1 = 0; // switch 1 state variable int sglAlpha = 0; // sigil alpha value void setup() { size(400, 400); ring = loadImage("ring.png"); sigil = loadImage("sigil.png"); imageMode(CENTER); } void draw() { background(0); //switch to control rotation of ring switch(sw1) { case 0: // stop rotating rotateRing(counter); break; case 1: // rotate left counter-=0.005; rotateRing(counter); break; case 2: // rotate right counter+=0.005; rotateRing(counter); break; } // show/hide sigil pushMatrix(); tint(255, sglAlpha); image(sigil, width/2, height/2); popMatrix(); } void keyPressed() { if(key == '0') { sw1 = 0; } else if(key == '1') { sw1 = 1; } else if (key == '2') { sw1 = 2; } else if(key == '4') { if(sglAlpha == 0) {sglAlpha = 255;} else {sglAlpha = 0;} } } void rotateRing(float dir) { pushMatrix(); translate(width/2, height/2); rotate(dir); noTint(); image(ring, 0, 0); translate(-width/2, -height/2); popMatrix(); }